Blog: Things that go 'beep'

Are we being exposed to too many beeping electronic gizmos? That is the question Tony Allsop is asking in this blog post.

We were driving along a country road recently when we heard a rather urgent-sounding double 'beep'. It was one we didn't recall having heard before, so we started a check for possible sources. There were no unusual icons or lights on the dash display, so we checked the GPS, phones and cameras: everything seemed in order.

The car manual mentioned various warnings, but we found quite a few that said to consult dealer, so we were no better informed, and had no idea where the beep had come from.

Some weeks later, I happened to be looking at the dash when we heard the same beeps again. For a couple of seconds only, the 'triangle with exclamation' icon appeared, with a warning that we had been driving for over two hours! Mystery solved.

A gas level monitor we were testing had shown no sign of beeping, although we knew our gas cylinder was almost empty. We returned from a walk to hear a strange melodic beeping around our van, and traced it to same monitor. It had taken the warmth of the day to create a temperature differential above the gas level, and trigger the monitor.

Fellow CW correspondent and friend, Lionel Mussell, called in for a coffee recently. Our conversation was intermittently interrupted by high pitched beeping. When I rose to investigate, he said it was indicating the arrival of spam emails on his smart phone: he had learnt to ignore them.

All this makes us wonder, however, just how helpful these beeps are. Some can be life saving e.g. smoke alarms, but a beeping microwave (warning you to remove food) is simply annoying if you are involved in another task elsewhere in the van.